The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

In December 1944, the notorious Josef Kramer commandant was stationed in the camp. To this day his image is etched in my memory, his face and shape and his standing. I remember him with his coat and his tall boots, buttoned at his feet, while we stand almost naked in order. Every time he came to Bergen-Belsen made our situation worse, every visit to the camp was accompanied by instructions that would make it worse prisoners' conditions - reducing the portions, distributing more sparse food. Kramer even instructed to inject all of us an anti-typhoid vaccine, supposedly to prevent from the disease spread, but many of the prisoners were too weak and fell ill as a result of the injection. They died in droves, in quantities those that the crematorium did not withstand and the bodies remained where they fell, on the edge of the road, one on the other, and the other prisoners had to get around them or skip over them. It was a horrifying spectacle. To this day it shows up in my nightmares and makes me startled. My mother and grandmother were among those inmates who fell ill. On the night of the 23 rd in March 1945, my grandmother died, and a few hours later, in the morning on March 24, my mother died. I watched as they were taken out from the barrack and found myself shouting "Mama!" My father adopted me close to him, and so it was over. I lost both of them in one night without being able to cry or mourn, except for that lone shout. To this day, I can't cry. I feel the tears in my throat, I feel the crunch, but I can’t cry even not out of joy. There was only one time, the only one, which I cried in my adult life and about which I will tell later. This is how we spent eleven months in Bergen-Belsen under the conditions that went worse and worse until April 1945, when the Germans realized that the allies were moving toward the camp. Then it was decided to evacuate us on trains to other camps, where they can speed up the extermination process. The first and second trains arrived at Theresienstadt. I was kicked together with my family on the third train that was also intended to arrive to Theresienstadt, which later called "The Lost Train." On April 10, 1945, we were taken on foot to the Celle train station, distance about two km. Many of the prisoners, who were typhus patients, were too weak to walk and fell dead during the march, and we had to skip over them to keep going. We supported each other so as not to run into the fallen and stumble on our own, as each of us knew that if the guards watch us they would shoot at us without hesitation. Though I wasn't sick of Typhus at this point, since I was ill in the camp and already recovered, I was very weak and suffering from headaches as a result of hunger. At the Celle train station, each family distributed a piece of bread and a sausage that should have been enough for the entire trip. Then we got on the train, but luckily we never reached the final destination. Shortly after we began the journey, the Allied bombings began, which continued continually day and night. This is how the train happened sometimes moving forward and sometimes backwards, two miles here and two miles there, back and forth, back The Lost Train

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